


another head hangs lowly

by Merideath



Series: worlds [7]
Category: The Avengers (Marvel Movies), Thor (Movies)
Genre: Alternate Universe - The Walking Dead Fusion, Alternate Universe - Zombies, F/M, Minor Peggy Carter/Steve Rogers, The Barton Family Road Trip From Hell
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-11-01
Updated: 2017-11-01
Packaged: 2019-01-28 02:51:21
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,874
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/12596484
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Merideath/pseuds/Merideath
Summary: There’s a hundred and twelve miles between them and Fort Lehigh.





	another head hangs lowly

**Author's Note:**

  * For [Dresupi](https://archiveofourown.org/users/Dresupi/gifts).



> The Walking Dead AU nobody* asked for.
> 
> I wish there was more of this, there is more in my head but words are hard and brains are dumb. 
> 
> For Dresupi who is amazing and deserves nice things and the shambling dead apparently. 
> 
> Thanks go to dizzy, Aenaria, & holly for beta reading my autocorrect nonsense and shifting tense filled draft.
> 
> *they may not have asked but they certainly enabled. 
> 
> Title from Zombie by the Cranberries

 

There’s a hundred and twelve miles between them and Fort Lehigh.

One hundred and twelve miles too far. They’ve been on the road for two days, weaving between abandoned cars on the highway, when the RV jerks to a stop. A plume of smoke billows up from the engine.

“Aw, engine, no,” Clint whines.

Darcy stills in her spot at the table, fingers tightening on the cards in her left hand. Her right hand drops down to touch the knife at her hip.

“What’s going on?” Cooper asks. The boy reaches out to catch Lila’s smaller hand. Lila says nothing at all, just clutches a stuffed animal dog to her chest, wide-eyed and pale.

“I don’t know,” Darcy says, dropping her cards face down on the table. The RV’s metal-edged table is a map of the US decorated in dinosaur and sparkly Hello Kitty stickers. The view out the side window shows a few cars jumbled up on the side of the highway and more broken through the stretch of long grass in between stretches of faded asphalt.

“Mom,” Cooper calls out. The ‘o’ sound stretching out. Lila says nothing at all.

“Shh, it’s fine,” Laura calls back from the passenger seat. “Just a bit of...car trouble.”

“Is it deadheads? Dad said I can use the little crossbow he got me. I wanna shoot a deadhead.”

“Cooper.”

“But dad said. Didn’t you dad? Daaaaad.”

“Did he now,” Laura says side-eyeing her husband.

“I, uh, might have,” Clint says rubbing the back of his head. “Look, we’re stopping here for a bit. Kids you stay in the RV,” Clint says. He didn’t say that it’s safer inside. He didn’t have to.

They’ve been on the road for two days, but they’ve been together for a few months, camping out on a patch of bare land as close to the city as they could reach at the time. When the world went to hell the government tried to save people. The funnelled everyone for miles around to the big cities. Safe places that turned into a play-zone for the dead that would not lie down.

Darcy, the Barton family, Mrs Rogers and her daughter Sharon, Deputy Barnes, Luke, and Claire never made it into the city. They spent the first night on the highway stuck in traffic. She’d been on an overcrowded bus near the Bartons’ RV when the driver opened the doors and let people wander between parked cars. She had the Bartons to thank for saving her from creepers on the bus when Cooper threw his sister’s toy and it landed on Darcy’s head.

Laura had offered Darcy a coffee with them and another family, the Rogerses, and when the decision was made to head for a lookout point and camp out for a few days Darcy went with them.

“Looks like we’re gonna be stuck here for a little while, folks,” Sheriff Rogers, Margaret ‘Call me Peggy’ Rogers’ husband says. “We should see if we can find some gas.”

“Supplies too,” Darcy says, eyeing up a truck with a blue tarp covering the bed of the truck.

“We’re low on water and anything that isn’t in a can,” Laura says.

“This is a graveyard,” Claire says. She crosses her arms over her middle, cupping her elbows in her hands.

“So’s the whole fucking world,” Clint says. Laura smacks his shoulder with the back of her hand and he winces. He mouths a sorry and slings an arm around his wife’s waist.

The truck with the tarp is a bust. Beneath the sheltering plastic is a tangle of furniture and boxes of brightly colored clothing that were ugly even in the apocalypse. The tarp is useful though and Darcy takes her time carefully folding and rolling it up while Clint digs through one of the boxes of clothes, holding up a purple Hawaiian shirt.

Darcy leaves the tarp by the RV and slips away through the cars, her internal brain radio flipping through fragments of songs. Her fingers itch for the ipod at the bottom of her bag back in the RV. The battery was flat and the cable lost in the attack that took the lives of two of their group and led a family to splinter off and try their luck headed in the opposite direction. It wouldn’t be safe to listen to it now, not out in the open.

Whatever happened to cause the pile up had been long enough ago that the bodies left behind had turned into mummies stripped of their bandages, with extra holes in their heads. Claire was right, this place is a graveyard, even more than the stores Darcy scavenged from on the edge of the city.

Darcy climbs into the open door of a grey SUV with the front all crunched up and the deflated airbag hanging limply over the steering wheel. Spots of dried blood decorate the airbag and the spiderwebbed window. Her stomach does a weird little lurch as her brain tries to weave together the threads of the driver’s story. There is a first aid kit in the wheelwell and a small swiss army knife dangling with the cluster of keys. Behind the passenger seat is a black backpack.

She pulls at the backpack’s strap but the thing refuses to budge. “Come on,” she huffs, contorting her body to get a better hold. The backpack inches up and something scrapes the back of the seat. She pulls harder and the backseat gives up its treasure. The backpack comes loose and so does Darcy. She half falls out of the car banging her elbow on the steering wheel.

“Oh yeah. Who’s your mama?” Darcy says to the backpack giving it a gentle pat on the strap. Some sort of small axe in a leather bra thing is hooked to the outside of the backpack. She grasps the zipper pull and drags it back, teeth parting to reveal stiff green packaging.

“Get down,” the sheriff, Steve, hisses. He’s crouching low, moving between the car Darcy’s in and a rusted out pickup truck next to it. “Walkers.” Steve jerks his head back towards the RV.

Darcy’s heart jumps up to lodge in her throat and she sets her foot down on the road to look back the way Steve had come, in the direction of the RV and the other cars driven by the group. There is nothing to be seen at first, until a jerky movement between two vehicles catches her attention. “Shit,” she breathes out but Steve is already gone, weaving between cars.

She pulls the door closed, ducking down low. She crawls into the back seat where the windows are tinted. A plaid blanket is bunched up on the seat. Her stomach feels like a lead weight as she drags the blanket up and over her head. A decision she immediately regrets when all she can see is a sliver of the view out of the cracked windshield. Shit.

Her breathing is loud beneath the blanket. Darcy curls her fingers around the knife hilt at her hip. Seconds tick by until the scent of the drove, of the dead, washes over her through the one inch gap in the driver’s side window. The knot in her belly tightens, twists in a circle. A bubble of acid burns in the back of her throat. It’s been months but the smell of the dead is still stomach turning.

Something bumps the SUV and the breath in her lungs stills. She can hear them as they move, steps shuffling, stumbling along, a low murmur of sounds expelling from rotting throats. The hungry dead, the geeks, the zombies, the walkers. The names didn’t matter, only how fresh the rotters were, how fast they could move, and which were the empty husks of the people you once knew.

The dead thump against the car and she gets a glimpse of bodies moving slowly forward. Adrenaline snakes down Darcy’s spine. Her whole body screams for her to run, to push the blade of her knife into the skull of the nearest deadhead, and the next and the next until she can get somewhere safe. Get back to the RV and the gun Peggy had been teaching her to use.

She bites down on her lip until the taste of copper blooms on her tongue. The car is bumped again, and Darcy clenches and unclenches her hands. Drags up the words to Don't Fear the Reaper in her head and lines them up like chess pieces. The words tumble over and over again sinking into her thoughts, unravelling like a sweater.

Time dilates, stretching out beyond reason. Waiting was never a thing Darcy found easy, but when faced with the dead, biding your time was the best thing to do. Bored was better than rotting any day.

The last of the drove stumbles out of sight. Darcy crawls out of the SUV and lifts the backpack over her shoulder and books it back to the RV as fast as she can.

“Are you okay, Darcy?” Peggy asks as Darcy stumbles into the loose circle of their group.

“No, but I'm still here,” Darcy shrugs.

….

They divvy up jobs, fixing the RV, gathering wood, scavenging supplies, keeping the kids from wandering off into trouble. She wonders if Laura Ingalls Wilder would be proud of the way they circle the wagons. The group isn’t a family, but they argue as much as one.

Sliding her knife through the ear of a rotter trapped by a seatbelt and rummaging through the car makes her feel like a graverobber. It’s different from taking supplies from the stores at the edge of the city. Darcy rolls her shoulders back and pulls a sharpie pen from a pocket. She scribbles an ‘x’ on the window of the car, swallows down the whisper of guilt lodged in her throat.

…

Pop. The sound of a rifle shot echoes from the woods beside the highway. The woods where Rogers and Barnes went to collect wood, with Steve’s kid, Sharon, in tow while Peggy stayed guarding the group and Clint and Luke fiddle with the RV’s engine.

The gunshot leads them to the Lehnsherr-Xavier farm and more trouble than the walking dead.  
….

Her legs feel like jell-o when her boots hit solid ground. “Good, horsey horsey,” she mutters under her breath. Patting the horse’s neck she scans the street in front of the smallest drugstore in the world.

The town itself isn’t much bigger. Half a dozen businesses line the street on either side of the drugstore. An independent coffee shop with a smears of dried blood on the glass door. A pristine looking salon. A grocery store, wooden baskets of long spoiled fruit and veggies line up beside the doors.

Riding horses is not a thing Darcy ever wanted to do again. She was pretty sure Ol’ Gluestick thought the same about her. Horses were the worst, or at least this one, that Doc Lehnsherr lent her back at the farmhouse when she volunteered to go for antibiotics, is the worst. Okay, maybe there were some things worse than horses, like walkers, arrogant veterinarians, the general lack of hot water, and morons with firearms.

Not that Darcy was holding a grudge, but she was totally holding a grudge against that toad Morty for mistaking little Sharon for a deer. Deer didn’t wear t-shirts with happy yellow suns or their uncle’s festering baseball cap. The twins seemed okay, but Pietro’s fluffy hair with its bleached ends is pretty unforgivable. Mostly it was nice to talk to someone that was a normal age and not an adult or a little kid or Clint.

The town, village, hamlet, whatever is quiet, pin-drop quiet, no zombies milling about in the road, lurking in the shadows of buildings. The world was a quieter place now that society had pretty much gone down the crapper. Maybe one day she would get used to it. Today was not that day.

“After you,” Pietro says pushing open the door and smoothly stepping over a spilled basket.

“Whatever. Let’s just be quick. This town is way too quiet and it’s freaking me out.”

The place smells dusty and sweet, like old popcorn and fake strawberries. Some shelves are empty, items littering the floor. Others look like they’ve never been touched. She shoves things into her bag as fast as she can. Toothbrushes, bandages, little pots of lip balm, two bottles of nail polish, vitamins, and the pregnancy test Peggy requested earlier that day. Darcy really did not want to think about that or the boy with the frosted tips muttering to himself as he read the labels on little white boxes.

His voice is accented, and try as she might Darcy can’t curb her curiosity any longer. “So, what’s your story, farmboy? How’d you get here?”

“On an airplane. They have those in Sokovia now, you know.”

“Smartass.”

“My sister is the smart one.”

“So what, you’re the pretty one?”

“You think I’m pretty?”

Darcy rolls her eyes. “Ugh, forget I ever asked.”

“Found them,” Pietro says holding up a small white box.

“Cool,” Darcy says. She doesn’t bother to do more than glance up from where she kneels on the floor, stuffing sanitary products in her pack as fast as she can.

“Let me help.”

“I've got it, dude.”

“Please,” Pietro says, picking up a blue box from the floor and offering it to her. The tips of Darcy’s finger graze the edge of the box.

“Oh my god,” Darcy says arching her brows up at the box of flavored condoms.

“Rahat,” Pietro says, hot color creeping up his neck. “Sorry. I didn't mean. God.”

"Here, you'll have better luck with this," Darcy says, grabbing a tube of lubricant from the shelf and tossing it at him. Her face is burning hot and she can't quite swallow back the laugh bubbling up in her throat.

“What’s Re-her?”

_“Rehat.”_ __

“Reeheart.”

_“Rehat.”_

_“Rehat.”_

“Better.”

“It's the Sokovian word for...eh...the...toaletă. No, fuck. Uh, poop?”

“Shit?”

“Yes, that! Thank you,” Pietro says pointing at her a wide grin lighting up his pretty face.

Darcy can't help but smile back, a light feeling creeping into her chest.

…

Darcy fidgets in the doorway, knuckles raised to knock and a bowl of blackberries cradling against her hip.

“Are you going to knock or stand there all day?” Pietro says from behind her.

Adrenaline burns through her veins as she whips around, hugging the bowl to her chest. It takes a breath before she notifies her dominant hand hovering over the knife at her belt.

“I picked...er, the kids, you know, Lila, Sharon and Cooper, picked too many blackberries. Thought you might, maybe, want some,” Darcy says feeling like a complete idiot.

“They’re Wanda’s favorite,” Pietro nods. He steps forward into the very safe bubble of space around Darcy.

The sleeve of his flannel shirt brushes her arm as he pushes past Darcy to open the door.

“Are you moving?”

“Moving, that is a thing that I can do,” Darcy mutters following Pietro’s fluffy hair through the house. Awkward much, Darcy? Ugh, worst apocalypse ever.

She didn’t even like him, not really. Mostly she avoided him like the plague. Easy enough to do since the supply run to get antibiotics for Sharon.

Sharon is getting better by the day, though the tension between the adults is getting harder to stomach. That was something else to think about. Something safer than feeling something, feeling anything other than the push of adrenaline that keeps her alive. Fear.

Darcy felt a different sort of fear now. A little spark of want and hope.

Hope is a dangerous thing in a world that was worse that anything Stephen King could dream up.

“So, your dads are hot," Darcy says. She sets the bowl of blackberries on top of the kitchen table with more care than necessary.

"I don't want to hear your departed thought about my father and Charles," Pietro says. His face twists up in disgust.

"Depraved."

"Yes, you are." He flashes a smile, quicksilver fast, and tosses a fat blackberry into his mouth.

"No, the word you said...Ugh, you know what… never mind,” she huffs. An awful, awkward, spidery warmth fills her belly. Darcy shakes her head, tilting her face down to the floor. The messy locks of her hair tickle her overly hot face.

Pietro brushes her hair away, curling it back around her ear. His fingertips graze the side of her neck and his tongue darts out to wet his lips “Are you okay?”

“Just peachy,” Darcy says.

“We have some, in cans,” he says sweeping his thumb along her jaw. The movement isn’t quite smooth but it’s enough to hitch Darcy’s breath.

“I told your sister I didn’t like you.”

“S’okay, I like you plenty for both of us,” Pietro grins and presses his mouth to hers. It’s not a kiss for the history books. It’s awkward. So awkward. Pietro’s nose bops against hers. Their mouths take far too long to slot togethers. The edge of his teeth dig into her lip and here is altogether too much spit. But it’s real. Messy and awkward and real.


End file.
